Britain did not do well with its ambassadors to the Sublime Porte. Sir Nicholas R O’Conor was an ineffectual diplomat wedded to the old Liberal position of regarding the Turks with distaste and had, by his stance, alienated the Sublime Porte and assisted the German policy of increasing penetration. He was replaced by Sir Gerald Lowther, who in turn was succeeded in July 1913 by the ineffectual Sir Louis Mallett, an ex-‘Soul’, who was encumbered by little diplomatic experience and no knowledge of Turkish. His report for 1913 contained his assessment that Turkish policy was unlikely to take a revolutionary course, and that British influence was strong and was not under threat.31
Gathering intelligence
The Consular Service also provided a vital source of information. The British Consulate at Constantinople was in Galata, as was the British Post Office under Frank Ferguson. Mr. C E S Palmer, the vice-consul at the Dardanelles, lived at Chanak, on the Narrows, while another British vice-consul William Grech, lived on the European side of the Straits at Gallipoli port. The Austrians, French, Russians and Germans also had their own post offices at Constantinople. The German Embassy, built in 1875–7, was in Fundukli. In 1898, as part of his policy of cultivating good relations with Turkey, and increasing German influence and penetration in the Near and Middle East, the Kaiser paid two state visits to the Sultan and his domains. He later claimed to be a secret Moslem, to be the protector of all the Moslem peoples, and on one of his visits rode through a specially created gateway in the wall of Jerusalem, in full field marshal’s regalia, on a black charger.32
William Thompson was Harbour Master and Inspector of Police, and appears to have played a murky role. A further interesting sidelight on the Foreign Office’s clandestine activities in Constantinople is provided by surviving correspondence relating to the Constantinople Quays Company. One letter of 1907 from the Foreign Office to Sir William Garstin, asking if he would be interested in becoming a director, declared:
The F.O. are very greatly interested in the welfare of the Constantinople Quays Co. I do not for the present intend to enter into the details as to the scope or workings of this Co, as this can be done later … this is not an ordinary sort of Co, but one in which the F.O. has a very special interests [sic]… May I ask you to reply by the Agency bag?33
Further such correspondence makes it very clear that in the period 1905-7 officers and agents were engaged on duties for ‘His Majesty’s Secret Service’, in many theatres ranging from the Baltic to the Ottoman Empire to China.34
Much of the intelligence work was in the hands of the amateur ‘honorary attachés’, usually aristocrats with good education and linguistic capability (including George Lloyd and Aubrey Herbert; they were to be reunited after the outbreak of war in the Intelligence Department at GHQ Egypt, and later the Arab Bureau) who intended to make the Foreign Office and Diplomatic Service their career. They had no intelligence training, and did not necessarily receive instructions from military or naval intelligence as to what types of information to seek. It does not appear that Sykes, or any of the Embassy staff, tried to get an agent into the Turkish Survey Department to obtain copies of the new maps but, even if it had occurred to them to try, such an action would probably have been ruled out by the Embassy as being ungentlemanly and undiplomatic. It was a matter for secret service. As Callwell knew, gold would buy anything in Turkey, but apart from being expensive it was an extremely dangerous business. Such an agent could easily disappear; his body might be found floating in the Golden Horn. Whatever the fact of the matter, none of the crucial results of the new Turkish survey of the Gallipoli Peninsula found their way into British (or Allied) hands before the landings in April 1915.
Multicultural and cosmopolitan, Constantinople was particularly fertile ground for espionage. Moslems, Christians (Catholic, Protestant, Greek and Russian Orthodox), Jews, Turks, Greeks, Europeans, Asians, Levant traders, diplomats, consuls, attachés, members of military and naval missions, businessmen, scholars and archaeologists all rubbed shoulders. Bribery of underpaid officials was commonplace. English sovereigns and French Napoleons were freely circulated. There was a large expatriate community, with two daily Anglo-French newspapers, the Levant Herald and the Oriental Advertiser, English, French and German bookshops, French, German and Russian hospitals and a British seamen’s hospital. However, the easy multiculturalism of earlier decades was, before the war, giving way to increasing polarisation between Christians and Moslems. From 1907 the Constantinople mosques were closed to Christians; henceforth special permission had to be sought in advance through diplomatic channels. Macmillan’s Guide, later to be echoed by John Buchan in Greenmantle, noted that:
Stamboul … is a meeting-place for men of all races and religions. Costumes and dialects of every variety are to be seen and heard in the streets, where Armenian porters, Levantine sailors, Greek merchants, Turkish soldiers, priests of various confessions, mullahs, and dervishes, jostle each other all day long.35
The strategic position of Constantinople, on the cusp of west and east, north and south, on trade and shipping routes from Europe and the Mediterranean to the Middle East, the Black Sea, the Danube, and Russia (Britain’s arch-enemy in the ‘Great Game’) made it a natural magnet for espionage. The British watched Russian activity in the Caucasus, and the German construction of the Berlin–Baghdad and Hedjaz Railways, with great interest. A vast tonnage of shipping flowed ceaselessly through the Bosphorus, the Sea of Marmara and the Dardanelles, and the masters of ships continually reported on the evolving defences, as did British lighthouse keepers, coal merchants, salvage operators, lawyers and traders. On the Black Sea coast, the life-saving stations of Kilia and Riva were under British captains, as was the lightship fifteen miles from the eastern mouth of the Bosphorus, marking the approaches.36
The military attachés and ‘military consuls’ at Constantinople and Adrianople supplied vital information to London. They had various sources, some of them clandestine, and were anxious to protect these sources which their reports, even if they survive in the archives, do not specify. In his evidence to the Dardanelles Commission, Colonel Hankey was asked about the reports of Colonel Frederick Cunliffe Owen, military attaché at Constantinople from December 1913 until the outbreak of war: ‘Were not the reports of the various Military Attachés from Constantinople and elsewhere communicated to the Imperial Defence Committee, and subsequently to the War Council, or were they kept at the Foreign Office?’ Hankey replied that: ‘They come to the Foreign Office, who practically use themselves as a post office to send them on to the War Office.’37 Cunliffe Owen, whose leisure activities as an enthusiastic yachtsman provided him with convenient access to the waters and shores of the Dardanelles, supplied important reports on the eve of, and after the outbreak of, the war. Compton Mackenzie was more forthright about the activities of military attachés in the Balkans, stating that ‘they are really War Office spies in the Embassies and Legations to which they are posted; but few of them have the courage to admit this to themselves.’38
Naval intelligence up to 1914
The Navy had not only been gathering hydrographic and other intelligence but had, as was seen in Chapter 2, studied the problem of forcing the Dardanelles on several occasions, but most recently in the aftermath of the 1906 Akaba crisis. The Naval Intelligence Department (it became a division of the newly formed Naval Staff in 1912) printed two reports on Turkey, Coast Defences (including the Dardanelles) around the turn of the century: NID 458, December 1896 and NID 458a, June 1901. These were superseded by NID 838, May 1908.39
The final draft of Ottley’s 1906 report made it clear that naval intelligence was considered very efficient at this time, noting about the defences that: ‘We have reliable secret information in regard to these points of armaments and mines.’40 Further, the good intelligence extended to landing places:
The character of the beaches selected for the landings [on the north shore, in the area of the Gulf of Saros] is entirely satisfactory, and accurate and recent
information is in our hands as to the nature of roads for the march across the peninsula.41
However, Ottley explained that the halcyon days of easy intelligence gathering in the Ottoman Empire were now a thing of the past; the veil was coming down. In his first and second drafts, Ottley had made the point that increasing religious sentiment among the Turks was making bribery less possible, and intelligence about Turkish defences more difficult to gather. Citing the claim of the Sultan to be Khalif of all Islam, he stated that ‘it is now no longer possible to buy even the most venal of Moslem pashas with a view to secure the inaction of the batteries in the Dardanelles’, and ‘the loyalty of the pashas in charge of [the forts] was, until very recently, believed with reason to be not proof against bribery.’ They could no longer be paid to abstain from firing as the fleet passed through the Straits! In the same context, ‘our secret agents at the Dardanelles’ were now finding their task almost impossible. German political influence and German gunner instructors were also important factors. Intelligence would still be forthcoming, however, from attachés, consuls, ships’ masters and the indigenous Greek population.
After 1906, both services went ahead with the gathering, collating and printing of voluminous reports on the defences of the Dardanelles and the Turkish coast generally. The Akaba crisis, Ottley’s paper and subsequent studies led to the NID amplifying and updating their earlier report on Turkey’s coast defences. The new version, Naval Intelligence Department: N.I.D. 838, Turkey. Coast Defences and Resources; Coast Defence Ordnance and Arsenals, May 1908,42 gave a very full description of the defences of the Dardanelles (including a description of the Peninsula, its land defences, and the Bulair Lines), including many maps, plans, charts and plates (see Appendix II). The War Office also produced a new Report on the Defences of Constantinople (1909). Both of these important documents were printed as secret or confidential books, with many maps, charts and plates, and were to prove a vital source of tactical and topographical intelligence when war broke out in 1914. They were periodically supplemented by updated intelligence reports, and were continually referred to by the CID, the War Council (after the outbreak of war in 1914), the War Office and the Admiralty. Copies were also issued to naval and military commanders in the Mediterranean theatre, where the Navy in particular had a well-developed intelligence service.
Apart from the armaments question, the Navy does not seem to have given the Gallipoli Peninsula and Dardanelles a high intelligence priority. While attempts to gather hydrographic and other intelligence were made by NID at points on the German coast, Lieutenant Brandon (Admiralty Hydrographic Department) and Captain Trench (Royal Marines) being arrested and convicted by the Germans in 1910 for spying on North Sea coastal defences,43 no such efforts apart from the normal hydrographic surveys already discussed have come to light in the Dardanelles area as far as the specific, detailed hydrographic intelligence it needed for landings was concerned, and in 1915 the Navy complained that it suffered from lack of such information. It had, therefore, to acquire it during the operations themselves.
While Haldane’s reorganisation at the War Office had created an efficient, modern General Staff, at the Admiralty there was no such staff in 1911 when the Agadir Crisis focused attention on the appalling lack of preparedness should Germany launch a sudden attack. As a result of the naval issues highlighted by the Agadir Crisis, Asquith appointed Churchill as First Lord in 1911, specifically tasking him to make such preparations. Churchill set up an Admiralty War Staff for this purpose in 1912. The Naval Intelligence Division (NID) was formerly the Foreign Intelligence Committee (formed 1882), which became the Naval Intelligence Department, created in 1887 under ‘Blinker’ Hall’s father, Captain W H Hall. NID was incorporated by Churchill into the new Admiralty War Staff.
In 1912 the Admiralty also created its Air Department, which (under Churchill’s overall leadership) was to prove vital for making the decisions enabling the RNAS to provide aircraft, crew and photographic equipment for the Dardanelles in 1915. There was a certain amount of general, and occasionally specific, liaison between the War Office, Admiralty and Foreign Office before the war, while the CID provided an efficient working framework. There was, however, no joint intelligence committee and no joint chiefs of staff committee as there was in the Second World War. On a planning as well as operational level, the Army and Navy were jealous of their traditions and spheres of action, and cooperation did not come naturally in an atmosphere of competition and rivalry. The naval race had seen the Army very concerned for the safety of its annual estimates, as the cost of building new dreadnoughts and super-dreadnoughts gobbled up large chunks of the budget.
The Turks had long prepared the Dardanelles against naval attack by constructing forts and batteries, supplemented before the war, following the advice of the British Admiral Limpus, by torpedoes and plans for minefields. They also constructed certain fieldworks on the Peninsula, commanding the landing places, in 1897,44 and again during the war with Italy in 1911–12 and the Balkan Wars of 1912–13. The reports and maps of the period after 1906 were prepared as the result of appreciations made by the Military Operations Directorate at the War Office and the Naval Intelligence Department at the Admiralty following the increased tension with Turkey associated with the 1906 Akaba Incident. With a Naval Mission in place, and British merchant shipping passing through the Straits daily, the British were perfectly positioned to gather intelligence on the Dardanelles.
In fact the Dardanelles fixed defences and topography were extremely well-documented by both the British Navy and the Army, drawing on information supplied by their own intelligence departments, through diplomatic and consular channels, by secret service agents and above all by military attachés in foreign capitals; each service, in cooperation, produced its own copiously illustrated report on them, containing printed descriptions, maps and plans, photographs and panoramic sketches.
These crucial reports, details of which have already been given, were Naval Intelligence Department: N.I.D. 838, Turkey. Coast Defences and Resources; Coast Defence Ordnance and Arsenals, May 1908 (see Appendix II), and General Staff, War Office: Report on the Defences of Constantinople, 1909, Secret (see Appendix III), which also gave a full description of the Dardanelles defences, as well as much vital topographical information, including landing places, ‘going’ and water supply, useful to a force landing on the Peninsula. It was accompanied by a folder of associated maps, plans, panoramic photos and topographical sketches, including a panoramic sketch of Suvla Bay from the sea and full details of the Bulair Lines. A crucial component of this Report was the one-inch to the mile (1:63,360) Map of the Gallipoli Peninsula (GSGS 2285) in two sheets. A secret edition of this map showed the Dardanelles Defences and the Bulair Lines in red.
There is abundant evidence of extremely close cooperation between Admiralty and War Office in both reports. They contained much the same material on the Dardanelles coast defences, though NID 838 was much more detailed; Part II of NID 838, focusing on the ‘Dardanelles, Coast Defences and Resources’, specifically noted: ‘Much of the information used to bring this Report up to date has been supplied by the Military operations Directorate’ at the War Office, while among the supporting maps were the two secret edition sheets of the War Office one-inch map (GSGS 2285) used in the 1909 Report. NID 838 also noted that ‘In this description the spelling of the names of places in the Gallipoli Peninsula has been made to conform with the spelling on the M[ilitary]. O[perations]. D[irectorate]. Map (Map 3A) accompanying this report.’ This was the secret one-inch map. The reports were periodically brought up-to-date by intelligence reports before and during the war.
The British and French had appreciated in the years before the war that Turkey was likely to join the Central Powers in the event of a European War, and this was certainly the British General Staff view from 1910. While there was close cooperation between the British War Office and Admiralty in this period, there was no joint intelligence committee or joint planning
staff. It was not until 19 March 1915 that the Secretary to the War Council (formerly to the CID), Colonel Maurice Hankey, as a former Royal Marine officer extremely aware of the hazards of amphibious operations, tried to remedy this situation by recommending to the War Council the setting up of a joint technical committee, but nothing came of this prescient move.45
The military intelligence situation from 1906 to the First World War
The aftermath of the Boer War, and Haldane’s subsequent reforms and reorganisations at the War Office had created an efficient, modern General Staff for the specific purpose of planning, organising and collecting intelligence for war. The Directorate of Military Operations from 1907 to 1914 comprised the following sections:46
MO1
Strategical Section
MO2
Foreign Intelligence – European Section (Sub-Section B included Balkans and Ottoman Empire in the Near East)
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